Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 08.djvu/226

214 troops burned the town. Since then I have been in the habit of daily intercourse with all classes in and about Columbia, high and low, rich and poor, male and female, whites and blacks, yet I have not met with a single person who attributed the calamity to any other cause." "If," he adds, "a transaction that occurred in the presence of forty or fifty thousand people can be successfully falsified, then all human testimony is worthless." As evidence of the general distress and suffering which resulted from the sack and burning of our city, and the desolation of the adjacent country, the committee refer to the fact, established by unimpeachable testimony, that for about three months daily rations, consisting generally of a pint of meal and a small allowance of poor beef for each person, were dealt out at Columbia to upwards of eight thousand destitute people.

The committee have designed by the preceding summary of the more prominent events and incidents connected with the destruction of Columbia to present only an abstract of the numerous depositions and proofs in their possession. The proprieties imposed upon them by the very nature of the duties to which they have been assigned have precluded their doing more. In the evidence thus collected may be read in all its pathetic and heart-rending details the story of the tragic fate that has befallen our once beautiful city. Impressed with the historic value of the proof referred to, and their importance to the cause of truth, and with a view to their preservation, the committee respectfully recommend that they be committed to the guardianship of the municipal authorities and be deposited with the archives of the town, trusting that, in after and better times, they will yet be found effectual as well to vindicate the innocent as to confound the guilty.